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Tesla CEO Elon Musk just admitted what we have been saying since he first made his grand promises about the companys Cybercab robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robot: His target to mass-produce these products was unrealistic, and now theyre crumbling faster than a Cybertruck’s accelerator pedal. On January 20, Musk said on X that early production of both products will be “agonizingly slow”a remarkable admission for a man who has spent the past year telling investors these moonshot projects would save his flailing car company. “For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely fast,” Musk wrote. This is the same man who promised that the Cybercab would launch in 2026 at a price “under $30,000,” revolutionizing urban transportation with fully autonomous vehicles that would cost riders just 20 cents per mile. And the same person who, at his Hollywood spectacle of an event in October 2024, claimed these scissor-doored wonders would transform parking lots into parks. It’s the same Musk who said Optimus would be working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025, with 5,000 units produced in 2026 and eventually 1 million per year within five years. But two sources in the Optimus supply chain claim that “Tesla had only procured enough parts to produce 1,200 Optimus units and had manufactured close to 1,000 before manufacturing halted (more on this later). As of now, there are no robots doing any meaningful work in Tesla factories; this week, Musk claimed they are “currently doing simple tasks.” We do know, from videos online, that they move at glacial speeds and can’t replace human workers in any way. [Image: Tesla] Fail after fail Let’s review the scoreboard of broken promises. Musk announced the Cybercab in 2024 at the We, Robot event, saying production would begin in 2026. Experts immediately called BS. “Tesla software is at least years behind where Waymo is,” Matthew Wansley, a professor at New York’s Cardozo School of Law, told Reuters at the time. Wansley was right to be skeptical. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving manages 71 miles between critical disengagementsmoments when a human has to grab controlcompared to Waymo’s 17,311 miles. And that gap hasn’t closed. Tesla still reportedly depends heavily on tele-operators to prevent fatal accidents. On December 7, 2025, Musk promised that unsupervised Cybercabs were going to start driving in Austin in three weeks. There are no reports confirming this that I could find, though there is word that those Cybercabs are still supervised as of January 23, albeit from a chase car. Optimus, meanwhile, has become the Fyre Festival of robotics. Musk claimed in April 2025 that “Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue, like it’s really bananas. It will be the biggest product ever.” He told investors the robot would “eventually dwarf” Tesla’s vehicle business and could unlock “massive new economic value.” Production of the robot froze completely last June and October. Overheating joints, limp wrists, and batteries that died before lunch forced Tesla to halt procurement after manufacturing only about 1,000 units at $60,000 eachunits that moved at less than half the speed of the humans they were supposed to replace. Its no wonder hes now warning that he was deeply wrong (and yet still managed to throw another empty promise that we are supposed to believe). This slow admission is just the latest chapter in Musk’s decade-long saga of vaporware. He has claimed Tesla would solve Full Self-Driving “this year” every year since 2014. Its 2026, and Musk is warning of “agonizingly slow” production instead of the revolution he promised. [Image: Tesla] Here’s a prediction The timing of Musk’s confession couldn’t be worse for Tesla. The company’s core business is collapsing. Much of Tesla’s $1.39 trillion valuation, according to Reuters, “hinges on investor expectations for its self-driving technology and humanoid robots, even as the company’s core revenue and profit continue to come from electric vehicle sales.” Translation: The stock is inflated on fantasies while the actual business falters. So here we are, watching Musk admit that his previous timeline was fiction while maintaining that production will “eventually end up being insanely fast.” Eventually. That word again. Tesla trades with the valuation of a tech revolutionary while delivering the results of a struggling automaker with stagnant design, obsolete technology, and a CEO more focused on serving popcorn with speeded-up robots at Hollywood diners than fixing his company’s hemorrhaging sales. I’m not Musk, and my crystal ball may be as broken as his, but here’s my prediction: These “agonizingly slow” production ramps will decrease revenue numbers, wear investors patience thin, and ultimately end in an agonizingly fast stock collapse.
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E-Commerce
Every year, Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley issues a challenge to his team that would make most executivesand their teamsbreak into a cold sweat: Reinvent 50% of the Australian Open. Not subtle changes or a few tweaks. Half of everything, so no two tournaments are ever the same. Today, to help satisfy Tiley’s mandate, the event has evolved into a three-pronged innovation machine. There’s an in-house R&D lab that’s been developing analytics, broadcast, and fan engagement advancements for more than 15 years, alongside a startup accelerator that’s piloted 40 companies, and a $40 million VC fund to capitalize those startups. “The 50% innovation challenge creates something most large organizations struggle to cultivate: permission to fail,” says Machar Reid, director of innovation and AO Ventures general partner. It’s working. The 2025 Australian Open set attendance records with 1,218,831 fans through the gates over three weeks, breaking the previous year’s mark by more than 100,000. It attracted 1.9 billion global viewers, drew 2.3 billion social impressions, and generated $565.8 million for host city Melbournes economy. And this year’s tournament, which rolls into its final rounds this weekend, is poised to be another record-setter. Inside Tennis Australia’s tech workshop It all started with AO Labs, Tennis Australia’s research and development arm. This is the internal division that builds the broadcast and fan engagement technologies that have transformed how people watch tennis. Last year’s breakout was AO Animated, which uses skeletal tracking to turn live matches into Nintendo Wii-style cartoons. The technology tracks 29 points on each player’s body at 50 frames per second, creating real-time avatars that move exactly as the players do. The feed went viral in 2025, drawing nearly 1 million viewers in the first four days alone. [Image: AO Animated] The technology is fun. But it also solves a real problem. Tennis Australia took over its own broadcast production in 2015one of only two Grand Slam tournaments to control its own broadcast (the US Open only recently started moving in this direction). Other Grand Slams turn broadcast production over to networks like ESPN or TNT Sports. Tennis Australia maintains creative control, then licenses that production to broadcast partners including ESPN in the U.S. and Channel 9 in Australia. [Image: AO Animated] But those licensing agreements create restrictions. The AO Animated stream functions as a legal work-around. Since it’s generated from tracking biometric data rather than relying on video footage, it doesn’t violate exclusivity agreements. Viewers without broadcast subscriptions could clip highlights and share them. Fans loved it. Players found it hilarious. By week two of last years tournament, Tennis Australia was providing the feed to three broadcast partners, and they’ve brought it back again for 2026. AO Animated is among the latest in a series of experiments. But even AO Labs isn’t enough to satisfy Tiley’s 50% mandate. To achieve that, the team knew it had to tap external resources. Turning Melbourne Park into a tech incubator In 2022, Tennis Australia launched AO Startups. The goal: identify early-stage companies with technology Tennis Australia could eventually implement, giving both sides a chance to test product-market fit at one of the world’s biggest sporting events. “Rather than trying to be really narrow with a problem statement, we stay purposefully broad,” says Reid. “There are occasions where we don’t know what we don’t know.” The 2025 cohort included 12 companiesthe largest since inceptionspanning digital ticketing platforms, AI-powered personalized menus for dietary needs, automated screening checks, production project management software, and wearable resistance suits for athlete training. The selection process is rigorous, but fast. Startups apply through aostartups.ausopen.com, with applications opening periodically throughout the year and Tennis Australia announcing new cohorts in the lead-up to each Australian Open. Applicants are evaluated on team quality, market opportunity, ambition level, and mutual impact potential. Those accepted get access to Tennis Australia executives, pilots across the organization’s summer events, and pathways to becoming official suppliers. Each pilot is customized based on the company’s stage and technology. Some test products still in development. Others run full-scale deployments. Some pilots test across Tennis Australia’s entire three-week summer seriesthe United Cup in Sydney and Perth, Brisbane International, and Adelaide Internationalwith select pilots deployed at the Australian Open itself. The customized trials give funders real-world feedback at scale while giving Tennis Australia confidence that the systems work under pressurewhich is critical, given that they’re not just piloting tools that enhance the broadcast and fan experience, but technology that can impact the matches themselves. Six engineers vs. one monopoly In 2021, four engineers walked away from Hawkeye, the company that had dominated electronic line calling in tennis for two decades. They teamed up with two others and founded Bolt6 specifically to build something bettera cloud-first system that could do things Hawkeye’s legacy architecture couldn’t. Tennis Australia had been a Hawkeye client for 17 years. When Bolt6 approached the team about piloting new technology through AO Startups, Reid saw opportunityand a lot of risk. “[Line calling] is our highest-risk technology,” Reid says. “If that does not work, we’re in trouble, because it’s calling lines for the playing group. It’s not like we have lines people waiting on standby to jump in if the technology goes down.” So Tennis Australia methodically de-risked it, inviting Bolt6 to join AO Startups. At the 2023 Australian Open, Bolt6 ran in stealth mode alongside Hawkeye on the tournament’s center courtside-by-side testing, every call compared. In 2024, Bolt6 handled all Australian Open lead-up events and expanded to testing alongside Hawkeye on three stadium courts during the main tournament. Only after two years of testing did Tennis Australia deploy Bolt6 across all 17 courts for the entire 2025 summer, fully replacing Hawkeye. Risk/reward The gamble paid off. Bolt6’s cloud architecture unlocked capabilities Hawkeye couldn’t deliver. Because the system is cloud-based, Tennis Australia could centralize operationsrunning all courts from one location instead of requiring on-site servers at each venue. The system processes faster and integrates with other platforms more easily, opening new possibilities beyond just calling lines. [Image: Bolt6] In fact, it’s Bolt6’s technology that drives the skeletal tracking and 360-degree camera system that AO Labs integrated to create the Wii-style animations and dynamic broadcast angles. Technology that started as line calling evolved into a dynamic broadcasting tool. [Image: Bolt6] “It is a genuine partnership around how to create stories for the viewer at home,” says James Japhet, Bolt6 cofounder and chief commercial officer. “It’s not just us doing it, this is us working hand in hand with Tennis Australia.” The partnership has turbocharged Bolt6’s growth. The company went from being deployed at three events in 2023 to 40 in 2024, around 90 in 2025, and now a projected 170 events in 2026, expanding beyond tennis into sports like NASCAR and the PGA Tour. “I don’t think we would have had that same trajectory without the partnership and support of Tennis Australia,” Japhet says. A global stage for tech startups Another company, Raven Controls, came through AO Startups in 2023 with a different kind of technology. Founder Ian Kerr, a former police officer in Scotland who specialized in emergency planning, had built an incident management platform after witnessing chaos at major eventssafety decisions that weren’t properly logged, stakeholders who couldn’t communicate, critical information lost in radio chatter. Raven digitizes that coordination. The platform is cloud-based and AI-driven, creating one centralized system where every incident gets logged, every decision gets recorded, and security, medical, and crowd control teams can all see what’s happening in real time. “Before Raven, these systems were all siloed,” Kerr explains. “Security would know about an incident, but medical wouldn’t. Or crowd management would see a problem, but it would take 20 minutes to coordinate a response.” By the time Kerr connected with Tennis Australia in 2023, Raven had already managed UEFA Champions League finals, two Euro soccer championships, and two Ryder Cups. Reid saw the value immediately. The platform could handle the complexity of coordinating security, operations, and emergency response across Melbourne Park’s 17 courts and sprawling grounds. The AO Startups pilot tested Raven across Tennis Australia’s summer events in 2023, giving Kerr’s team real-world feedback at scale while providing global exposure beyond their European base. Completing the innovation loop With the in-house lab and external tech incubators thriving, in January 2025 Tennis Australia completed the innovation loop, launching a $30 million fund called AO Ventures. Backed by 150 investors, including venture capitalist Brad Feld and prominent Australian families, the fund writes checks of around $500,000 for seed rounds and $1 million for Series A, according to Reid. To date, four investments have closed: Bolt6 and Raven, along with two padel propertiesMindspring Padel and Padel Haus. The goal, according to Reid, is to invest in approximately 20 companies, with at least five emerging from the AO Startups pipeline. The key, Reid says, is that Tennis Australia becomes not just the investor, but ideally the customer a well. “Our best way of delivering return is for us to be a client and be able to shout from the rooftops,” he says. After Raven completed its pilot and became a Tennis Australia client, the company competed for a contract with Legends Global, which operates more than 300 stadiums across North America. Legends conducted due diligence with Tennis Australia, and its reference, Kerr sayscombined with Raven’s proven performance across Tennis Australia’s eventsis what helped Raven win the contract. “Having Tennis Australia as a part of our profile has absolutely given us a massive stamp of approval at a very senior level,” Kerr says. “That support was invaluable to us.” A 70% success rate Ten startups are participating in the 2026 tournament, including the National Pickleball League, VueMotion, and Truefuels. Since launching in 2022, 40 companies have piloted their technology through AO Startups. Some 70% have become Tennis Australia suppliers or partnersa conversion rate that significantly outperforms typical corporate accelerator programs, where 40% to 50% is considered strong. Tiley has said he wants to make the Australian Open “the biggest sporting event in the world.” The three-pronged innovation engine turning startups into global players is driving the Open to ever-higher levels of fan engagement. “From a leadership point of view, I tell the team to come and ask for forgiveness, not permission,” Tiley told Boardroom. “The approach is: Just go for it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll just make some adjustments and give it a go again.”
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E-Commerce
Mascots are currently enjoying a renaissance. From McDonalds Grimace to the WNBAs Ellie the Elephant and Pop-Tarts Pop-Tart guy, companies everywhere are leaning on characters to represent their brand values and attract eyes on social media. Now the Trump administration is joining in with its own mascot. Its a literal lump of coal. The coal mascotnamed Coalieappears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Coalie officially debuted on January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted him (it?) on his X account. In the post, which has now been viewed more than 37,000 times, Burgum shared an obviously AI-generated illustration of himself kneeling next to a grinning, bug-eyed piece of coal that’s decked out in a yellow coal miners helmet, vest, and boots. The caption, in part, read “Mine, Baby, Mine!” [Image: USDOI] A deeper exploration of OSMREs website shows that Coalie appears to be a genuine effort on the agencys part to explain its goals. And while it may not have been OSMREs intention, a poorly designed lump of coal is actually the perfect metaphor to represent the Trump administrations desperate attempt to revive the coal industry. The perfect mascot for Trumps energy agenda Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has been on a mission to prop up coal, despite both environmental and economic data pointing to a dwindling future for fossil fuels. Coals dominance has been declining for years, and for good reason: Burning coal is linked to air pollution that can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, and more. Its one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas pollution, with environmental experts estimating that the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Further, multiple studies have found that coal is among the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it significantly less competitive than renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and natural gas. Nevertheless, last April Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, at the same time that his administration suspended a decades-old program to detect lung disease in coal miners. In September, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend more than half a billion dollars to prop up coal. [Image: OSMRE] Now enter Coalie: the mascot tasked with the gargantuan challenge of making Trumps coal bailout seem palatable. In a new post to OSMREs website titled 10 Things to Know About How OSMRE Supports Americas Energy Legacy and Communities, Coalie is pictured smiling and waving in multiple hastily assembled graphics. Hes serving as the cheerful mouthpiece for several dubious claims, including that OSMRE works with Indigenous peoples by consulting with tribal leadership through a government-to-government process (see the federal governments long-standing history of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition), and that OSMRE evaluates the potential environmental impact of federal actions and practices responsible stewardship of public lands and resources (there is no environmentally responsible way to harvest coal). In short, Coalie has been handed an impossible job. Ironically, if any mascot could succinctly su up the Trump administrations asinine insistence on a fossil fuel comeback, it would be a shoddily slapped together illustration of a lump of coal.
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E-Commerce
Over the past couple of days, TikTok has been flooded with owl impressionsalbeit ones in which the birds sound like various celebrities, have regional accents, or find themselves in hyper-specific situations. Its a trend better seen with your own eyes than explained. My impression of an owl if the owl was Jennifer Coolidge is one such viral example. If Trump were an owl, impersonated another. An owl but its Keira Knightley, another posted. Or an owl but its Bella Swan, said yet another. The hashtag #owlimpression currently has 13,000 videos of TikTokers hoo-hoo-ing in various likenesses. There are also definitive rankings of the best impressions thus far. Other celebrities who have received the owl treatment include Shakira, Alan Rickman, Barack Obama, and Hugh Jackman. Even Jonas Brothers members Joe and Nick Jonas have joined in to playfully troll one another. Accent-based owl impressions are a big part of the trend, too, with creators demonstrating what owls would sound like if they were from China and Texas or Scotland and Australia. Some are even as specific as an Italian American owl from New York or an owl from the Bronx. The trend has since snowballed into a bit of a competition for the chronically online over just how niche the impressions can get, building on the internet’s shared cultural language. Here, the distinctive voices of Jennifer Coolidge and Keira Knightley, as well as Hugh Jackman in his role as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, are internet references as much as they are real people. Alongside cultural references such as RuPauls Drag Race and Love Island, there are the broader impressions of owls in everyday scenarios: an “owl as a jealous girlfriend or an “owl who only hangs out with the guys. Theres an impression of an owl if it was a dad getting up and an owl that trips over a cobblestone that sticks out a little bit too much. While undeniably silly, this trend offers a welcome reprieve from the brain rot and AI slop that have come to dominate much of the internets shared spaces in recent months. Perhaps that explains why a trend so genius in its simplicity has caught on with such gusto across the social media platform. Sure, ChatGPTs image generator could certainly morph a celebrity into owl form, complete with sound effects. Or unleash deepfakes of SpongeBob SquarePants characters on the internet. With little hesitation, though, the human brain can conjure up what Jennifer Coolidge might sound like as an owl. AI could never come up with an impression like this of an owl that was on the Titanic.
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E-Commerce
Apples iOS 26 has been available for nearly six months now, but its still one of the companys least well-received software updates for the iPhone. Primarily, people have criticized the new Liquid Glass user interface design, which Apple now lets you tone down. But iOS 26 also changed the way many apps function on the iPhone, disrupting a users muscle memory and expectations, leading to many to pine for the way the iPhone functioned on iOS 18. Yet while you cant revert to iOS 18 once youve upgraded to iOS 26, you can make some simple tweaks that will make your iOS 26 iPhone function as it did before. Heres how. 1. Give Safari the layout it used to have, before iOS 26 After Liquid Glass, one of the most frequent complaints Ive heard about iOS 26 relates to the Safari app. In iOS 26, Apple changed Safari’s default interface, giving it a new compact design that hides important buttons, including bookmarks and tabs. In iOS 26, you now have to tap a new three-dots button next to the new compact URL bar to reveal the buttons that let you access your bookmarks, tabs, and other functions. This change both disrupts muscle memory and requires you to tap more just to access the browser’s basic features. Thankfully, you can ditch the new iOS 26 Safari layout and revert to the layout Safari had in iOS 18 by doing the following: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Safari. Under the Tabs section, tap Bottom. Doing this again places the important bookmarks and tabs buttons directly on a toolbar at the bottom of Safari. 2. Switch back to the classic Phone interface In iOS 26, Apple also changed the layout of the Phone app, giving it a new unified interface that both merges the Favorites and Recents toolbar buttons into a single Calls button and jettisons the Voicemail button entirely. While this change declutters the Phone interface, it also means you have to tap more just to access basic featureslike your voicemails. Thankfully, as with Safari above, you can revert the Phone app to its old interface: Open the Phone app. Tap the three-bar button in the top right corner. In the pop-up menu, tap the Classic interface button. Your Phone app will now have the same layout it had in iOS 18. 3. Stop Music from auto-mixing your songs iOS 26 not only changed the layout of some of the iPhones most popular apps, but it also changed the way you hear your music in the Music app. In iOS 26, the Music app cross-mixes your songs by default, melding the end of one with the beginning of the next using AI. Needless to say, this annoys the heck out of many music aficionados, who like to hear the entire song as the artist envisioned. But thankfully, you can disable this AI slopification of your songs by doing the following: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Music. Under the Audio header, tap Song Transitions. On the Song Transitions screen, toggle the Song Transitions button to off. Your music will now play as it did in iOS 18. 4. Disable background wallpapers in Messages iOS 26 brought some helpful new features to the Messages app, including polls and the ability to live translate messages not in your native language. But Messages in iOS 26 also added the ability to change a chats background. And while this in itself isn’t bad, the user doesnt have total control over the look of their background by default. The person they are chatting with can change it for everyone in the conversation. When this happens, its a distracting pain for all those who like to see blue bubbles against a clean, white background. The good thing is that you can disable background wallpapers by doing the following, which will make Messages look as it did in iOS 18: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Messages. Tap the Conversation Backgrounds switch to toggle the feature off. Even if the friend youre texting with changes their background, all youll see is the glorious white background you were used to in iOS 18. 5. Get PDFs to open where youre used to In iOS 26, Apple brought the Previews app from the Mac to iPhone. Previews is Apples PDF reader, and its presence on the iPhone isnt a bad thing. But the default way iOS 26 handles PDFs now is to open them in Previews, not the Files app (the iPhone’s file manager where documents are stored), which complicates things. In iOS 18, tapping on a PDF in Files would open it where you expected: inside the Files app. But in iOS 26, tapping on a PDF in the Files app kicks you out of Files and launches the Previews app, where the PDF opens. This is a pain, especially if you just wanted to quickly browse all the PDFs you have in the Files app. Luckily, you can stop this from happening by deleting the Previews app from your iPhone: Tap and hold on the Previews app icon. From the pop-up menu, tap Remove app. Tap Delete App. Tap Delete. Now, when you tap on a PDF in Files, it will open in the Files appjust like it did in iOS 18.
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E-Commerce
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